My Funding Picks For Last Week (W4)
Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. Then, I pick out a few companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things from that list. Here is my rationale behind this weekly exercise.
I am back with the weekly picks!
Last week Indian startups raised $1.55 billion compared to $433 million in the comparable previous week period.
The quantum jump in the capital flow was primarily due to unicorns like Swiggy, Moglix, and Ola Electric raising funds at increased valuation.
After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked two as my favorite funding news from last week!
Name: UrbanPiper
Amount Raised: Raised $5 Million from Zomato.
What does UrbanPiper do?
Edited from Tracxn: SaaS platform for brands and retailers to engage and monetize their customers. Provides a cloud-hosted service and mobile apps integrated with POS systems to enable flexible loyalty, rewards, messaging, and mobile payment solutions for consumers of brands and retailers. HQ in San Francisco, with the technology team based in Bangalore, India. Customers include Chai Point & Ratnadeep Supermarket.
Why do I like UrbanPiper?
Restaurant owners that decide on joining the world of online ordering face the daunting task of integrating with multiple food aggregators and catering to their order influx in addition to running a smooth physical operation. The job isn’t easy, and the customer is unforgiving (unless you’re offering free food!).
Therefore a full-stack solution like UrbanPiper that simplifies the integration of the online ordering world into the operation of the offline world is a need of the hour. This startup has all the ingredients to become a valuable platform if it can provide a stable product with a simple UX that encourages its core customer audience to use it to its fullest extent!
Name: Growth School
Amount Raised: Raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital
What does Growth School do?
Edited from Tracxn: Online platform offering cohort-based solutions for teachers. The platform partners with instructors and conducts online workshops for digital marking content. It offers courses on performance marketing, UI UX, cryptocurrency, and more.
Why do I like Growth School?
Growth School offers the next evolution to recorded training solutions like Coursera. Oddly, it also reverts to the original way that millennials (like yours truly) learned their skills – live tutoring in small groups!
I recognize many of the names offering their time to tutor a niche but vast online audience. I’d love to see some courses on investing, especially stock & angel investing, along with courses offered here!
Whether the master the LTV/CAC for this business by bringing in teachers with their following and students that will refer other students should be closely watched!
